On Christmas Eve, the US National Security Agency (NSA) declassified and released 12 years of reports outlining compliance violations that were submitted to the NSA Intelligence Oversight Committee. The reports, which are required by law, had previously been classified and were the subject of a legal battle between the ACLU and the government. Although heavily redacted, the reports the NSA released of are vital interest to the public because they reveal a pattern of significant privacy violations and in some cases serious abuses in granular detail.

Visiting Scholar: Privacy in a Modern Era — Pam Dixon is a visiting scholar at Portland’s PNCA. She is scheduled to speak with students in a round of interdisciplinary classes, and she will also be giving a public keynote at 7 pm in Swigert Commons. Her public lecture is on Modern Privacy.

India and Privacy — WPF has researched privacy extensively in India, and has documented a number of key privacy issues in a video series. So far, 5 videos in the series have been released. All of the videos were shot on location in India and feature Pam Dixon, with videographer Blake Hamilton. These videos offer a rare and early glimpse into privacy interactions and issues in India

Online privacy — Pam Dixon will participate in the IAB’s formal privacy policy debate as a privacy and consumer representative on Tuesday, Feb. 26. This marks the first time the IAB annual leadership summit has hosted a formal policy debate. The debate will be moderated by Katy Kay of Advertising Age.

Reputation and privacy — Pam Dixon spoke at the Southwestern Law School Privacy Conference on the topic of reputational privacy Friday the 22cnd along with Neville Johnson and Paul Tweed. Dixon highlighted three key consumer situations WPF assisted with recently, discussing the employment challenges consumers faced when harmful material was available online during the job search process.

This new WPF report finds that medical identity theft is still a crime that causes great harms to its victims, and that it is growing overall in the United States; however, there’s a catch. The national consumer complaint data suggests that the crime is growing at different rates in different states and regions of the US, creating medical identity theft “hotspots.” These hotspots are important for patients, policymakers, and healthcare stakeholders to know about so as to address potential risks.

WPF has conducted original research on India's Aadhaar, a national biometric ID system, including field research in India during 2010-2014. WPF has published the original research in a peer-reviewed journal, Nature-Springer, and in Harvard-based Journal of Technology Science. The research found that systemic challenges to data protection and privacy exist in the Aadhaar system, challenges which do have potential remedies. Key lessons can be learned for both the US and the EU as biometric systems grow in popularity.